Those of you who follow such things might know that over the years, the length of copyright terms has been continually lengthened – many blame Disney, hence the nickname of the most recent statutory extension being “The Micky Mouse Protection Act.”

That extension was passed in 1998, and was for twenty years – which means that this is the year!

For the first time in over 20 years, on January 1, 2019, published works will enter the US public domain. Works from 1923 will be free for all to use and build upon, without permission or fee. They include dramatic films such as The Ten Commandments, and comedies featuring Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd. There are literary works by Robert Frost, Aldous Huxley, and Edith Wharton, the “Charleston” song, and more. And remember, this has not happened for over 20 years. Why? Works from 1923 were set to go into the public domain in 1999, after a 75-year copyright term. But in 1998 Congress hit a two-decade pause button and extended their copyright term for 20 years, giving works published between 1923 and 1977 an expanded term of 95 years.

—3–

If US rights weren’t complicated enough, try throwing foreign rights (and then translation rights) into the mix. No, there’s no international standard for copyright (nor should there be), which means that digging up the rights to Mauriac, for example, was super-fun, especially since the French are constantly going en vacance.

Seriously. All the time.

(I’m only being a little sarcastic. I actually enjoyed, weirdly, that kind of work.)

I eventually turned in my badge, not only because I felt I’d done enough and was tired of reading mid-century Catholic fiction, most of it mediocre, but also because The Nun’s Storydid me in. The author, as I sorted it out, had left the rights to her friend/partner (that’s up in the air) who in turn had left them to be shared between the six remaining members of their former convent, and who knows where they were. When I learned that, I was like, c’est assez, merci.

As per usual with this program, the presentation and discussion was balanced and nuanced. The ambiguities surrounding his thinking on the ethics of executing a tyrant as well as his final theological journey into a set of ideas that were embraced by Death-of-God theologians a generation later (and therefore made him somewhat controversial in the period) was new to me.

–6–

Yes, I spent a couple of days in Charleston last week. Wish we lived closer!

Included: The Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, the chapel at the Pauline Books and Media store, the Charleston Museum – including the piano on which Gershwin composed most of Porgy and Bess out on Folly Beach and..as my daughter calls him…a Muppet dog.

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I am forever grateful for your work on the Loyola Classics series, because it led me to In This House of Brede, which is one of my all-time favorite books, and which is FALLING APART!!! So I need to find another hard copy posthaste!

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Badlands, South Dakota August 2019

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A short story about mothers, daughters, and why we believe what we say we believe…or not.